Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje and I wrote this story on the situation. The article prompted Roland Pastrano to contact me about his schizophrenic brother, Edward, who has been in Bexar County Jail for months now on a charge of “failing to identify to a police officer.”

Our follow-up story describes how Edward was deemed incompetent to stand trial and placed in a long queue for a bed at San Antonio State Hospital, a predicament that sheds light on a larger problem: a dearth of funding for mental health services from the state level.

Haven for Hope's campus

A few months ago, a $100 million campus for the homeless called Haven for Hope opened its gates in San Antonio. (Not so fast: drop your deadly weapons and illegal narcotics, please, into the “amnesty box” here at security.)

Touted as the first of its kind anywhere, the crisp, college-like campus is a coalition of about 80 social service agencies, many of them located on-site to deliver direct aid to the homeless. For the first time, the homeless here have access to meals, housing, job training, counseling, medical care and other services in one place.

As reporters on the newspaper’s projects team, my colleague, Melissa Fletcher-Stoeltje, and I are tasked with covering Haven, from its opening through the inevitable hiccups and successes that are following.

I’ve met some interesting homeless folks with some interesting names: among them, Moose, Blessed and Brad Cain.

I’ve tried to keep up with Blessed and Cain, a challenging process. Blessed resisted living at Haven and disappeared onto the streets for a while before popping up unexpectedly and joyfully in Haven’s kitchen. Cain was the first man on campus, but he has since foundered against the structured way of life there. I wrote about his complaints and his anger problems. At the moment, Cain is no longer speaking to me.

I’ve also wandered through some interesting places, most notably Ghost Town, a stalled construction zone in which scores of homeless commandeered their own sparsely furnished condos.

Melissa and I, along with photographer Bob Owen (a force of nature in following this unfolding story), spent the night in Haven’s courtyard, where the chronically homeless come to shower, eat and sleep on mats — and sometimes to sleep off drug and alcohol binges.

I wrote about Haven’s struggle to assist the large portion of the homeless who are mentally ill.

And I chronicled a big problem at Haven — the rampant misuse of prescription medications aggravated by the lack of an ordered system at Haven to dispense them.

For more on this massive experiment in social transformation, click here for MySA’s orderly compilation of coverage.

From my end, there’s certainly more to come.

Update: I’ll add to this post periodically as I churn out more parenting palaver.

• In this column, I explore my experiences with withering envy and boundless love.
• This one charts the ephemeral obsessions of my 10-year-old, flowing seamlessly from automatic weaponry to Buddhist meditation.
• Here I recount the major panic engendered by my toddler’s minor tooth injury.
• This is a bold attempt at writing a non-parenting parenting column.
• And lastly, I give you vomit and diarrhea. Incidentally, this column was a tad controversial, prompting valued reader Don C. Brummett to pen the following Letter to the Editor:

“Although I didn’t read past the first few words, I would say Chasnoff’s column hit a new low in journalism! Who does he think wants to read such trash?

Why do you want a columnist who can’t write anything better and doesn’t have the judgment or discernment to know better?

I look for positive articles and good writers with a standard of excellence in the Express-News. Chasnoff doesn’t contribute to that.”

A new low in journalism? I am tempted to take pride in this distinction. After all, it is a milestone in my profession. Instead, I’ll just have to quote the Dude on this one:

Would someone please read it and distill the main points into a short blog post so I can move on with my harried life?

(Side note: I had no idea you could double click on any word in a Times story and then click on the question mark to get an American Heritage dictionary definition. Cool.)

Personally, I’m a bit obsessive about strange words that appear in books or articles. Ornate and alien, they hover above the page and dare me to drop everything to look them up. I once bought a 2,230 page Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that contains more than 315,00 entries so as never to be left linguistically limp. Now I just use the wonderful Dictionary.com app.

There’s often healthy debate about whether it befits a writer to bedevil his readers with a baroque vocabulary. I’m enough of a word nerd to believe that with relevance and restraint, a well-placed gem can elevate the atmosphere of any story. One example is Jeffry Tayler’s “This Side of Ultima Thule,” a bleak, engrossing account of his journey into Siberia, which he calls a “boreal hell.” (Maybe you knew that “boreal” means “of or pertaining the north,” but I didn’t until I looked it up.)

Wolfie Blackheart at home

A colleague recently sent me a link to a local TV story that under normal circumstances would have appeared far out.

“Teen wolves descend upon San Antonio high schools,” the headline says.

Typically, I would have filed this “news” story in the same hippocampal region as I had the station’s previous reporting, presumably tongue-in-cheek, on chupacabra attacks, ignoring it while harboring a fast sense of uneasiness that this sort of malarkey could pass for news.

But these were not normal circumstances. A few months ago, I had passed off my own teenage werewolf story for the newspaper. The article had generated its own currents of uneasiness. And the disquiet flowed in direct proportion to the splash it made upon publication, rippling across the Web and the newsroom in waves of delight, disgust and, finally, death threats against me and my family.

Let us begin with the dog’s head.

Our metro editor, a great admirer of the Horrific Crime Story, forwarded me an email she’d received that contained a photograph of someone holding a bloody, severed dog’s head. My job was to find out who felled the blade.

I confirmed authorities were investigating the photograph as evidence of possible animal cruelty. Juiced by the news hook, I jumped on Google — and soon discovered a not-safe-for-work Web page dedicated to the pursuit and capture of the guilty parties. (It is a unique facet of reporting that “work” entails looking at websites that are “not safe for work.” I first experienced this when a Playboy bunny was arrested at the San Antonio International Airport and I was obligated to verify her status as a nude model online.)

Bunnies aside, be warned: The foregoing link is an entry in Encyclopedia Dramatica, a compendium of the Web’s most irreverent memes. It was my first glimpse into the dungeon of the Internet, where hunched, faceless geeks mine a mutant strain of humor known as “lulz” from content that the uninitiated or, let’s face it, the mature would most likely find distasteful. Indeed, those who disseminate such material often find humor in direct proportion to its capacity to shock, frighten and disorient those of us who are put off by things such as violent, racist language and dolphin porn.

Still with me? I haven’t even gotten to the werewolves.

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larrson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

The Encyclopedia Dramatica page was a goldmine, providing the names, phone numbers and addresses of the suspected decapitators, although the alacrity with which its creators had drummed up the data was startling. Of all the suspects, the most intriguing was Wolfie Blackheart, an eccentric, tough, gay pixie-goth with Tourette’s Syndrome who resembles another eccentric, tough, gay pixie-goth with Asperger’s Syndrome: Lisbeth Salander. (One big difference: Salander is fictional, a character in Stieg Larrson’s Millennium trilogy, and Wolfie Blackheart is real. Also, I’m pretty sure Salander doesn’t believe she is a dog.)

So I drove to Blackheart’s house and, heart thumping, knocked on the door. I half-expected the girl to leap out with a sword and slice off my head, leaving a frantic, headless reporter scribbling notes.

“Who’s there?” someone called out.

Summoning courage, I identified myself and said that I’d like to know whether Wolfie had decapitated a dog. The door opened, revealing a pint-size, unarmed goth who cheerfully said, yes, sir, she had cut off the dog’s head. She had also boiled the head and taken it out to the woods so the brains could leak out. She does this regularly as a hobby, only this time the police came and confiscated the head.

She then invited me into her home, whereupon I noticed that Wolfie was wearing a harness and a tail and seemed to bark involuntarily. For the next hour or so, I toured the house and chatted with Wolfie about various topics: sexual bondage, taxidermy, her sword collection, werewolves, etc. Here’s a photo slideshow.

I wrote the story that day and promptly fell ill with a terrible stomach virus. The article ran on the front page. Lying sick in bed, I observed the consequential madness unfolding on my iPhone.

Wolfie had gone viral. Her innate strangeness apparently was ripe for blossoming on the Weird Wide Web. Just Google “Wolfie Blackheart” and see for yourself. By its nature, the article was not only popular, but also polarizing, and the rift cleaved the newsroom. Bob Richter, our ombudsman, didn’t like what I’d written or its placement in the newspaper, so he wrote this column about it.

But I needed to follow up. After all, Blackheart was under investigation for animal cruelty. I was also interested in the anonymous Web users who’d rabidly and rapidly established the Encyclopedia Dramatica page.

I soon received a phone message from one of them. He left his name as “NT,” but I knew what that stood for: Nigger Troll. (Encyclopedia Dramatica had noted his efforts.) Yes, I was offended by this codename. And yes, that’s almost certainly the reaction that NT hopes to provoke in those who hear it. He is, after all, a “troll,” one of those rangy Web dwellers who exults in promoting discomfort; although he might deny this, I believe his chosen name is enough to earn the distinction. He is also a scrawny, teenage computer nerd who, when I met him at a local Starbucks, trembled uncontrollably.

As I recovered my stomach and tried to sort out NT’s tale, Wolfie’s story was inciting a rift online, most notably on Facebook (here) and YouTube (here), her supporters lauding her as a hero, her detractors comparing her to the bloodthirsty Jeffrey Dahmer. I felt the story taking on broader social dimensions: Wolfie Blackheart had evolved into an archetype, a black-clad, barking symbol that meant different things to different people. To some, she personified individuality in the face of repressive conformity; to others, she was simply a dangerous outcast.

To help me get all of this sinister strangeness straight in my still-attached head, I enlisted the help of a freelance writer named Julian Dibbell. His specialty is covering online culture, and his writing is lucid and entertaining. I recommend The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology and Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World.

Dibbell obliged and described the world of 4chan, a collection of online message boards. The photograph of the severed dog’s head first emerged on the Animals & Nature board, provoking anonymous vigilantes to hunt down the guilty parties. If Encyclopedia Dramatica is a compendium of Internet memes, then 4chan is a breeding ground for them. Some call it the toilet bowl, or even asshole, of the Internet. Many post images and messages on it anonymously, a fact that contributes to the downright weirdness of the content.

“That’s what makes the place so interesting and unsettling,” Dibbell told me.

I wrote this story about how Wolfie’s yen for decapitation raised the collective wrath of Anonymous.

Before doing so, I received all kinds of warnings not to mention 4chan in the article. One source left me a message on Facebook declaring that “hell will reign (sic) down on both of us” if I published the word. Two days after the story ran, NT called with a frantic message: Anonymous, he sputtered, had declared war on me. I checked the Animals & Nature board and, sure enough, discovered my personal data — home address, birth date, phone number, father’s name, wife’s name, etc., etc. — plastered alongside exhortations to rape and kill my wife before murdering me, the “Jew.” Helpfully, someone suggested that I be decapitated.

To say the least, I was shocked, frightened and disoriented. I’m certain many lulz were had. Of course, nothing happened.

Eventually, authorities determined that Wolfie had not broken any laws. (The dog was already dead when she cut off its head.) In the end, I’m not even sure what the whole episode meant, if it meant anything at all, other than perhaps it’s proof that sometimes teenagers, trolls and reporters have too much time on their hands. At the very least, in between bouts of nausea, self-loathing and fear, I had a fun time.

Wolfie, good luck, and thanks for the memories.

Other than encapsulating the foregoing week’s major news, each review is a gem of narrative journalism in itself, written lucidly and with glints of irony and gallows humor. It is essentially a mix of major national news and local “news of the weird,” and each strain is often wound about the other in a twisted, jarring juxtaposition.

Take this sentence from last week’s review:

Bombay’s Oberoi hotel reopened, and the California Highway Patrol was forced to temporarily shut down its South Lake Tahoe office after they mistook an “anal vibrator” for a bomb.

It doesn’t necessarily make you laugh, but it does make your eyes bug out in horror and incredulity. And folks, in my book, that’s entertainment.

Photo by Xelina Flores

Two generous souls have started a website (goodnight forever “Web site”) that fills a hole in my life. As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the duo — Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer — recently began compiling gems of long-form journalism in one place: longform.org.

On their no-frills, reader-friendly page, they’ve included a link to a nifty Internet tool called Instapaper. Readers who set up an account can bookmark to the stories selected by Longform.org and then read them whenever they want in an ad- and navigation-free format, online or offline.

Kudos to Linksy and Lammer for curating a page that could reignite the world’s appreciation for well-crafted narrative journalism. I know I’ll be a regular.

UPDATE 4/25: In the past 48 hours, I have ingested pieces on gay Austrian Neo-Fascists, the orgy-child of Charles Manson, a cocaine-and-Grand-Theft-Auto-addicted travel writer, and a man who killed his entire family and assumed the name of a disgraced journalist. Thank you, Longform.org.

We are now entertaining delusions of forming a husband-wife/writer-photographer team, roving across the world to capture and record its wonders.

And do you know the crazy thing about delusions? Sometimes, they come true.

But will enough of the homeless come?

Leaders say that depends on the cooperation of street feeders. And some street feeders say they won’t cooperate.